Anything Pink Rocks

A job in punk heaven.

Not long ago, a woman from Brooklyn named Shavonne wanted a catsuit to wear to a costume party. She went to Trash and Vaudeville, a clothing store in the East Village, and spoke to Jimmy Webb, a salesman. “I don’t have catsuits,” Webb told her. “No one’s the same across the shoulders and chest,” he said, tracing the wings of her collarbone with his finger. “Catsuits have to fit perfectly, and they’re expensive.” Webb is also the store’s buyer. “If I buy six,” he said, “I can only sell one.” Shavonne was disappointed. “Here’s what you do,” Webb told her. “You go to Capezio, on Broadway, and buy a unitard. You know what a unitard is?” She shook her head. “A full-body leotard,” Webb said. “They stretch to fit. You’ll look great.” She thanked him and left.

“Did you know I went to hairdressing school?” Webb asked me. I said I didn’t. “I’m a beauty-school dropout, three times,” he said. “Really, I’m more the kind of person to have my hair dressed than to dress other people’s. They told me I was inappropriately attired. I caused too much of a stir.”

I asked how.

“Wearing a unitard,” he said. “It was a leftover one year from when I was a quaalude on Halloween. A Rorer 714, the original quaalude. I was bone-thin back then, twenty pounds lighter than now. I got a solid-white unitard. I wore solid white, cheap, Thirty-fourth Street, high-heeled boots, and I had a little Puerto Rican woman bleach my hair with old-school wig peroxide. I must have looked like a Q-tip, but in a good way. I wrote ‘Rorer 714’ on the front. Years later, when people are looking for catsuits that are expensive and don’t fit, I know where a unitard is.”

Adolescents, college kids, musicians, hobbyists, and aspirants both timid and bold regard Webb as an authority on matters of dress—especially rock-and-roll style, especially high-punk-rock style, which he epitomizes. He has helped assemble wardrobes for MTV, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. Jenni Lee, a stylist specializing in editorial work and CD covers, says that she consults Webb in order to dress “rocker bands, metal bands, rockabilly guys, even indie bands.” She says that she also admires him because “he does daring things in dressing women.” For Josh Madden, another stylist, Webb is “the spirit of everything that rocks.” Madden values Webb’s pragmatic eye. “Stylists think you have to pull a lot of stuff for a shoot,” he says. “Jimmy tells you, ‘Don’t worry, just get the right thing.’ It works because he’s authentic. He’s at the heart of where this stuff’s coming from. He’s been around punk rock and music and New York City for a long time, and he’s around kids, too, so he knows. Where he’s coming from, think about New York in, like, 1981, with Madonna, Andy Warhol, Basquiat, the Ramones, Lou Reed, every different kind of thing going on. Jimmy’s one of the last pieces we have left of it, in my opinion.”

Webb is forty-nine. He is small and still so lean that he looks as if he were made from wires and cables. He has shaggy, dyed-blond hair, a narrow, asymmetrical face, thin lips, a jut chin, and slitty blue eyes. Tattoos climb his arms like vines. On his wrists he wears stacks of heavy silver bracelets that get cold in the winter. Around his neck hangs a silver heart surrounded by thorns. People often stare at him on the street. Some of them appear to be trying to place him as a cultural figure. Women tend to appreciate his flamboyance. Young men typically avoid looking at him, or, as they pass, cut their eyes toward him. They seem unsettled by his appearance, as if his audacity were a rebuke to their reserve. Webb has a signature outfit—jeans, a T-shirt, a leather vest, and in winter a leather jacket with a hood trimmed in skunk—and he likes it so tight that it is as if he were being swaddled. Except for the T-shirts, which usually say “Trash and Vaudeville” on the chest but sometimes have an image of Iggy Pop, Webb’s wardrobe is bespoke. His jeans and vests and jacket are made by a woman in Los Angeles named Agatha Blois.

A pair of Blois’s jeans costs between fifteen hundred and four thousand dollars, depending on how complicated they are and whether they are made from leather or fabric. Her typical customer is a movie star or a rock star or a famous designer—Karl Lagerfeld appears often in photographs wearing them. Webb has about fifteen pairs, half made from leather and half made from fabric. They are his signal extravagance. His instructions to Blois tend to be oblique. Once, he sent her a photograph from a fashion magazine of Iggy Pop naked and wrote, “I want a pair of pants just like that.” Webb loves “X”s and lightning bolts, animal prints, and anything pink, Blois says—pink and black being the trademark colors of punk rock. Most pairs she makes for him take a week of work. They have a lot of metal on them, and they have eyes up the outsides of the legs, so they can be tightened like corsets. They’re stitched as carefully as sails.

Blois keeps a pattern for Webb, but not all fabrics perform alike. “His hip bones need to ache,” Blois says of the period when Webb is breaking in a new pair. (“It’s not rock and roll if your pants don’t hurt,” he says.) If they don’t, he will return the pants to Blois for alterations, saying, “These are gigantic.” The leather jacket she made for him fit so tightly that for a month, while it was adjusting to him, the jacket bruised his forearms and elbows and made his shoulders hurt. Blois cherishes their collaboration. “Some of the greatest things I ever made, I made only because of Jimmy,” she says. “I told him once, ‘I don’t know if I could even be me if I didn’t have you.’ The more outlandish the clothes that I make for him are, the more he looks like himself.”

Webb has been a salesman at Trash and Vaudeville for seven years. He regards the store as a shrine—“rock-and-roll heaven,” he calls it. In 1999, he wrote a letter to the owner, Ray Goodman, asking for a job. He had a clerk at a copy shop type the letter for him, because he doesn’t use a computer. At his interview, he told Goodman that “when someone comes in for a shirt I know how to sell him socks and pants and a belt to go with it.” He was hired as the store’s lowest-paid employee, and within a year he had become the highest paid. According to Goodman, Webb embodies the store’s philosophy of selling. “Jimmy’s out to make a sale, but in a nice way,” Goodman says. “If you leave the store and your friends think you look terrible, they’re not going to ask you where you got your clothes. And if your friends think you look terrible you’re not coming back.”

Webb works seven days a week, and almost never takes vacations. “I tried to go to Cape Cod,” he told me. “On the bus. Sandpipers rock, but how long can I look at a sandpiper? I was back in two and a half days. Counting travel time.” On the sales floor, being “the dream-maker,” helping shy adolescents find “the rock star within,” he is happier than he is anywhere. “I don’t feel sure of many things in life, but I’m sure of two: I’ll be in New York forever, and I’m never leaving Trash and Vaudeville. I want to have them stuff me like—what’s it called?—taxidermy, and put me in a corner. They can rig it so someone can pull a string and I’ll say, ‘You rock,’ or ‘Tighter, tighter, those pants need to be tighter’—the things I say every day.”

Trash and Vaudeville occupies two long, narrow floors in a brownstone at 4 St. Marks Place. One floor is below the street and one is above—a metal staircase on the sidewalk connects them. Goodman, who grew up in Jersey City, “a couple of stops away on the PATH train,” opened the store in 1975. Its aesthetic, which depends mainly on its own brand of tight black jeans—the kind worn by the Ramones, who signed a poster hanging on a wall—has been consistent to the point of being static. “We fill a demand and a void,” Goodman says. The store also has its own clothing line, Tripp, which Goodman’s wife, Daang, designs. Twice a year, Webb and Goodman travel to Las Vegas to buy additional inventory at a trade show. Webb’s bracelets, which do not easily come off, and his pants get him special attention at the airport. Goodman says that he always looks for a separate security line from the one that Webb is using.

One afternoon, when I arrived at the store, Webb was standing at the top of the steps, as if on the prow of a ship. Beside him was a girl with light-brown skin. Her hair was drawn back, her face was small and round, and her features were delicate and finely drawn. She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt that said “Bullshit.” Webb introduced us, and she told me, “Jimmy’s amazing. He’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. He’s so warm.”

“I’ve watched her grow up,” Webb said.

I took her to be in her early twenties, but when I asked what she did she said, “I go to high school,” and named a progressive school on the Upper East Side.

“If you look at her face,” Webb said, “you can really see her mother.” Then he mentioned the name of an actress. Her last name was her father’s, a rock star.

The girl hugged Webb and left, and he went into the store. Upstairs, the back room is slightly wider than the front. There are racks of clothes and two aisles like paths. The far end of the store smells like leather, from the displays of motorcycle jackets. Close by the jackets are five stalls that serve as changing rooms. Each door is decorated. From left to right as you face them, there is a bondage door with black leather and chains; one with two tight-waisted dresses in a Moulin Rouge style; a stars-and-stripes door in red and black leather with the word “Trash” embedded in silver; a leopard-print door with leather and chains; and one with red zebra stripes fashioned into flames.

A dark-haired girl was standing in front of a wide, full-length mirror by the stalls. She had on a T-shirt that said “Sweet Ride,” and a pair of tight bluejeans. She was twisting around to see how her backside looked. “Do they squish my butt a little?” she asked Webb.

“You can’t get bigger, or you’ll have diaper butt,” he said. “You know, where it sags in the back?”

A slight Asian boy wearing gray jeans and a gray T-shirt stepped out of a stall. He looked like a pair of tweezers. “I want lower and tighter,” he told Webb.

Webb found smaller jeans for him, and the boy went back into the stall. “It’s always lower and tighter,” Webb said. “Nothing else.” When the boy decided the jeans were still too large, Webb found even smaller ones. Each time that the boy emerged from the stall, he seemed to be shrinking.

Sweet Ride appeared in black jeans. While she judged her image, the Asian boy arrived and stood beside her. He studied himself ruthlessly. Sweet Ride nodded, a kind of approval. She said, “Let me see your ass.”

Without taking his eyes from his form, the boy said disdainfully, “I don’t have an ass.”

From the front of the store, a saleswoman named Heather, who is tall and blond and festooned with tattoos, called Webb, and when he arrived she handed him the telephone. He listened for a moment. “I’m Jimmy,” he said. “You just come up, I’ll rock you out.” Then he hung up, and returned to the back of the store. For a girl with braces who was shopping with her father, he knelt to adjust the hem on her jeans. “I’m always down, folding and tucking,” he said. “I’m like an old Italian tailor, always in the back on my knees.”

When Webb stood up, there were two teen-age girls beside him modelling jeans in the mirror. The pants fit them like bark. “They conform over time,” Webb told them. “You’ll know if someone stole your pants. You’ll see them and you’ll say, ‘Those are my knees.’ ”

Webb then began finding pants for two young Japanese women. One would try on the pants, then open the stall door slightly, so that only the other could see. Then they would collapse into giggling.

By now, evening had fallen. The store grew quiet. Webb went and stood by the front door. A young man came in with a friend and asked to have his photograph taken with Webb. “My father will remember the day,” he said, meaning the punk period. He gave his camera to his friend and put his arm around Webb. “No flash,” Webb said, “because it’s so bright in here. I’ll look eight hundred years old. Let’s go outside.”

They walked out on the landing, and in the darkness there was briefly a pulse of white.

Trash and Vaudeville has acquainted Webb with scores of young moderns. The first account of his past that I heard was from one of them, Owen Kline, who is fifteen. Kline is tall and handsome, with big feet, a round face, and dark eyes. He lives with his parents uptown and hopes to be a director. “I’ve heard the entire Jimmy story a couple of times,” he told me one day in the store. “I know everything about him—he’s very open about his personal life. What would you like to know?”

I asked if he knew where Webb had grown up.

Kline shrugged. “Who knows where—Virginia or Vermont, or something like that,” he said. “He was living in a suburb, he went to high school, then community college, then ran away from home—interesting move. Years ago, there were so many more things to rebel against. It’s like Marlon Brando in ‘The Wild One,’ where they ask him, ‘What do you rebel against?’ and he says, ‘What have you got?’ You’ve seen that?”

I said I hadn’t.

“Well, rebellion’s turned more into a style and a fad,” he said patiently. “It’s pseudo. It’s also got real poserish. Jimmy’s authentic, though. He’s so alive, very funny, very eccentric. Anyway, so he met, I don’t know, along the way some maybe famous guy who was also running away, and came to New York City, I think in the seventies, worked in bars and got really into parties and drugs, went dancing at Studio 54, and then he got older, cleaned up, and became Jimmy from Trash and Vaudeville.”

Actually, Webb grew up in Wynantskill, New York, near Troy. His father owned a two-pump gas station that was attached to the family’s house, and raced stock cars on weekends at the Lebanon Valley Speedway. His mother, Nancy, dressed Jimmy and his two younger brothers identically to take them to the speedway.

Nancy loved dancing. “I always had to dance with my girlfriends, and I swore that when I got married my boys were going to learn to dance,” she told me. At seven, Webb began taking lessons from a great-aunt, and he kept them up through high school. “He was very good at tap dancing,” his mother said. “That was his specialty, but he also did some ballet.”

In addition, Webb attended, as a teen-ager, a cake-decorating class. “I don’t know where that came from,” his mother said, “but all of sudden he asked me if he could go. He was the only male kid in his class, and the youngest person, and the women of all ages—they were teens, married women, middle aged—they had a ball with him.”

Webb graduated from high school in three years. He was not a gifted student, he says; he merely wanted to get out of Wynantskill. “I think the other kids teased him a lot,” his mother told me. “Dancing was for girls, even though Fred Astaire was a star, but not around here, around Troy.” At sixteen, Webb enrolled in a community college in Connecticut. He hadn’t been there long before he decided to hitchhike with friends to Florida, where he met two men from New York who were on vacation, and when they went back to the city they bought a plane ticket for him to go with them. They got him a job “delivering cocktails in a gay bar, and I could see where that would lead, and I wanted more,” Webb says. “I wanted to dance and live, so I took off into the streets by myself with all the other runaway boys. No fear.”

In the bar, Webb had met a Spanish hairdresser named Jamie who persuaded him to dye his brown hair blond. “We started with a streak when I was sixteen,” Webb says, “and by seventeen I was totally blond. In no time at all we were using Ultra White Minx, Silent Snow—colors from the fifties. Then platinum everywhere. Every two weeks, so no roots. My scalp burned to the max.”

Dancing at night clubs was Webb’s favorite pastime. He liked Studio 54, with its androgyny and its excess, best of all. He would spend hours dressing to go there. In the years after the club closed, in 1986, there were times when Webb worked and had a place to live and times when he was homeless and drug-addicted. For a while, he slept in a box in Tompkins Square Park. “I got street in me bad,” he says. Once, famished, he was thrown out of a grocery store for eating bread off the shelves. As he described this period to me, one day in the store, he was rueful and subdued. “If you had met me in those days, you would have met Two Dollar Jimmy,” he said. “Not even Five Dollar Jimmy, let alone Million Dollar Jimmy.”

Webb lives by himself in the East Twenties. “In a little cave,” he says. “A basement with a lot of Jesus statues. I collect things from old churches. It’s something about old Italian women and their faith.” The apartment is dark, with pink walls. The bed has a zebra-striped spread. There are a lot of pillows, some with skull-and-crossbone figures on them. On the floor is a pink-and-black rug with a skull and crossbones. The walls are hung with photographs of musicians, and framed Trash and Vaudeville T-shirts signed for Webb by famous customers. There are a number of photographs of Iggy Pop. There are strings of little musical notes and feather boas hanging from the ceiling. Running along the baseboards are braids of Christmas lights. “I used to keep all the lights on, so I would have this little heaven on earth to come home to,” Webb said, “but it cost three hundred dollars a month, so now I only do some. I had Con Ed come and do an investigation of why it was so expensive. They walked in and thought I was crazy.” Most of the lights are pink, but some are purple. “You can buy pink all year round,” he says, “but you can only buy purple at Halloween, so I keep a stock of them.”

I met him one morning at the apartment in order to have breakfast in SoHo. He had been writing letters on pink stationery when I arrived, around nine. “I answer everyone who writes the store,” he said. “I get a lot of thank-you notes from kids and their parents.” (Excerpt from a parent’s letter: “Jimmy is the brightest star in the sky. His love and passion for what he does always shine through.”) “I figure if you take the time to write me, you deserve a reply. Besides, I’m up at six in the morning, like an old grandma, why not write for the store.” He put his letters into a leather bag that Agatha Blois made for him, and then he stood in front of a full-length mirror. He put some music on. “I can’t get dressed to go out without music,” he said. “It doesn’t happen.” He took a gauzy scarf from a rack of them and wrapped it around his neck, then he put on his leather jacket. When everything was settled to his liking, he looked around the room and said, “What will start a fire?” He pointed at some lights by the baseboard beside the door and said, “These,” and he got down on his knees and unplugged them. He picked up his bag and started toward the door, then stopped suddenly; the strings on his pants had caught on the leg of a table. “One thing about me is I get caught on everything,” he said. “I’m always tangled.”

We got into a taxi, and I asked to look at his bracelets. He extended one arm, then he frowned. “Mixed among all that silver, I want some gold now,” he said. I said, “Really? I never liked the way gold and silver look together.”

“Exactly,” he said. “It’s so wrong it works. How rock and roll is that? I want a big gold money sign, with diamonds on it, like a rapper but rude.” He withdrew his arm. “I’ve always loved diamonds,” he said, “but I really fell in love with them when I was with Agatha one time. We were in a juice bar in L.A., and she was wearing sweatpants and a little fifteen-hundred-dollar hooker top she’d made, and she had these diamonds on—she’s just a simple girl covered in diamonds—and I caught a glimpse of her in the window, and she was sparkling.”

“A necklace has to hang just above the cleavage, on the bone between the shoulders, if the dress allows it. And you should never look at only one thing. The other day, I was looking at my sneakers, and I started looking harder and looking harder, and after about a block I had to go home and change them.”

I asked how he knew when a dress or a pair of tight pants was right for someone.

“You see the lines,” he said. “I can’t draw, only stick figures—I learned that being a buyer—but following the line is where the art comes in.” The cab stopped briefly at a light. “There’s a place on a dress—when I’m zipping it up for someone, it’s almost the middle of the back—where the dress comes together around her,” he said. “You say, ‘Do you feel that?’ and when they say they do you know that dress will be wrapped and out the door. If it doesn’t fit, they won’t feel it.”

As we got close to the restaurant, the traffic stalled, so we got out to walk. “Did you always dress lavishly?” I asked. “I’ve tried being plain,” he said. “A few years before I worked at Trash and Vaudeville, I dyed my hair brown, I wore black pants and a white shirt, but every time I would surrender no money was made, and people still pointed and laughed. Dressing is all about the whole look. If one thing stands out, you’re a beautiful coat walking down the street, or a pair of pants on the subway. With everything on, even if the elements are different from each other, it blends. You can’t cross that line to Bozo, though. That’s my new term, the Bozo line. You must never cross the Bozo line. I could look like Bozo right now, but instead I’m totally fabulous. I just happen to look fabulous with thousands of dollars of clothes and jewels and a twenty-dollar shirt.”

As we walked, the strings hanging from Webb’s pants whipped around his legs, making a slapping sound. His bracelets and the pants’ metal fittings jingled; he sounded like a cop. When I mentioned it, he said, “I love that I make so much noise.” In front of the restaurant, a woman was bending over a stroller to arrange the blanket for an infant. Beside her was a little boy. I don’t know whether he heard Webb or saw him first, but he came suddenly to attention. His eyes grew large. He raised his chin as if he were watching something in the sky, and he wheeled completely in a circle to follow Webb’s passing. “I’m sure to him I look like Bozo,” Webb said. He smiled at the boy and gave a little wave. “Maybe not Bozo,” he went on. “Maybe just like a big toy.”

Sitting down, Webb took no notice of the people staring at him. The waiter brought us coffee. Webb told a long story that turned on his arriving in the city at sixteen, with his clothes in a pillowcase, and finding Trash and Vaudeville, seeing all the clothes he wished he could afford, and now being in the position of helping kids who reminded him of himself, of being “the dreammaker” to them, and the improbability of it, to his mind. The extent of what he considers to be his good fortune made him feel humbled, he said. The waiter put our food on the table. Webb looked suddenly quite melancholy. “I’m bewildered by life sometimes,” he said softly, “but I try not to live in the bewilderment.” ♦